welcome! jeremy freese is a professor in sociology at northwestern university. he finds blogging to be a good diversion from insomnia and a far better use of time than television.

Monday, September 10, 2007

i think i may have blogged this before, but some things are so true that they bear repeating

ABBA's "Take a Chance on Me" is the saddest song in the history of the world. It came up on iTunes again, and I couldn't listen to it all the way through. Aboriginal dirges about the loss of their land and society and how they are not building McMansions on top of Uluru are not so sad. "They'll Need a Crane" by They Might Be Giants, while also sob-in-your-Snapple sad, requires a more refined sensibility to appreciate and even then still isn't as sad.

The first verse, in case you don't remember and for some reason want to be thrown into melancholia:

If you change your mind, I’m the first in lineHoney I’m still freeTake a chance on meIf you need me, let me know, gonna be aroundIf you’ve got no place to go, if you’re feeling downIf you’re all alone when the pretty birds have flownHoney I’m still freeTake a chance on meGonna do my very best and it ain’t no lieIf you put me to the test, if you let me try

It's made much sadder by it being very cheerfully. Is this song part of Mamma Mia!? Is Mamma Mia! being done as a high school musical? I've always said I'm lucky I'm not one of those people who has to wear a cyanide pill in a locket around his neck, as there are faculty meetings I would not have survived. I think a gawky high school girl singing this song with sincere enthusiasm could likewise send me over.

You know, ABBA is often mistaken for a happy-pop sort of band, but the truth is that a lot of their songs are deeply melancholic. Knowing Me, Knowing You chronicles a sort of doomed-to-failure romance, SOS is about a relationship that has reached the point where the partners no longer recognize each other, and The Winner Takes it All conceives of love as an zero-sum game where the aims is for one person to conquer another. Not very happy stuff.